Heather O'Neill Quotes

#1. Becoming a child again is what is impossible. That's what you have a legitimate reason to be upset over. Childhood is the most valuable thing that's taken away from you in life, if you think about it.

Heather O'Neill

#2. If you want to get a child to love you, then you should just go hide in the closet for three or for hours. They get down on their knees and pray for you to return. That child will turn you into God. Lonely children probably wrote the Bible.

Heather O'Neill

#3. I have an artistic temperament, which is a really tragic thing.

Heather O'Neill

#4. In Moscow there were a hundred different words for sadness, and one of them was joy.

Heather O'Neill

#5. Love is a big and wonderful idea, but life is made up of small things. As a kid, you have nothing to do with the way the world is run; you just have to hurry to catch up with it.

Heather O'Neill

#6. You should beware of motherless children. They will eat you alive. You will never be loved by anyone the way that you will be loved by a motherless child.

Heather O'Neill

#7. They tried to look punk but came off looking more like cats with mange. Just

Heather O'Neill

#8. She was as secure as a sixty-year-old woman whose husband has never cheated on her.

Heather O'Neill

#9. As soon as I looked at Alphonse's face, I knew that he was dead. I had the strange feeling that I was dead myself. It felt as if I were lying at the bottom of a grave and earth was being thrown on me. When death takes someone you know, he holds you and whispers all his secrets in your ear.

Heather O'Neill

#10. They don't know. It's not their fault. What are they supposed to do when they've been told their whole lives not to believe in fairy tales?

Heather O'Neill

#11. What the hell is that?" he asked.
"Magic mushrooms."
"I've always wanted to try those," he exclaimed. "They sound so cute.

Heather O'Neill

#12. A cat's tail waved above the arm of the couch like an elegant hand in a black glove waving goodbye.

Heather O'Neill

#13. He had intense gravitational force. He was like Saturn because Saturn has so many moons. If I kicked my shoes up in the air, they would go into orbit around him.

Heather O'Neill

#14. All writers have the idea that they are famous.

Heather O'Neill

#15. Jules and I were tiny people. We were delicate. We were almost destroyed. We were vulnerable. Like nerds in a school yard of bullies, we could have traded our stamps and cards of extinct animals. That's the kind of people we would be if our situation were different.

Heather O'Neill

#16. It was terrifying to have the responsibility of living in a world that was filled with so much wonder.

Heather O'Neill

#17. Intimacy makes you feel unique. Intimacy makes you feel as though you have been singled out, that someone in the world believes you have special qualities that nobody else has.

Heather O'Neill

#18. A beige cat came down the stairs like caramel seeping out of a Caramilk bar.

Heather O'Neill

#19. If there was one thing responsible for ruining lives, it was love.

Heather O'Neill

#20. I didn't know how he managed to keep the weight of his secret when the burden of it was crushing me.

Heather O'Neill

#21. Pierrot knew that everything in the world was alive. Everything was composed of molecules that shook and vibrated and hummed. There was no such thing as permanence. Even the most stalwart object - such as a statue in the park - was struggling to keep itself together.

Heather O'Neill

#22. Whenever things were going well, I started to feel vain.

Heather O'Neill

#23. I had a ludicrous childhood, but I feel that I was able to profit from a lot of the idiotic and unfortunate things that happened to me by turning them into fiction.

Heather O'Neill

#24. The home is the most ritualized place in a society; each house is like a religious order with its own ceremonies.

Heather O'Neill

#25. Women aren't mean the way that men are. They're full of life and they're like God in that way.

Heather O'Neill

#26. God knows who we became when we masturbated. It was like our desire was a spirit that possessed us and took over.

Heather O'Neill

#27. In the temporary illumination of the headlights, the insects were scribbling out messages from God that we couldn't get.

Heather O'Neill

#28. Linus Lucas was fourteen years old, a number that made the spoons fall right out of our mouths.

Heather O'Neill

#29. We were broke in a way that only kids can be broke. Our toes were black with dye from wearing boots that weren't waterproof. We had infected ear lobes and green rings around our fingers from cheap jewelry. No one ever even had a chocolate bar.

Heather O'Neill

#30. Somewhere, a sparrow is singing in B minor.

Heather O'Neill

#31. My conversation is probably something like the rain. On some days it pours, and then on other days there's just a clear sky- not a word in sight.

Heather O'Neill

#32. Oh, we had a lot of sex back then in Montreal; it wasn't just me. Blame it on the cold. The roses in everyone's cheeks made them seem way more appealing than they actually were. We confused the indoors with intimacy and electric heating with connection.

Heather O'Neill

#33. The smallest a family can be is two members, and that was Jules and me.

Heather O'Neill

#34. The ground was silvery, as if some stars had fallen there.

Heather O'Neill

#35. I've been all over the place in all kinds of living situations. Due to the fact that my mind is my own worst enemy. In a way I am perpetually and permanently in a state of rehabilitation m in an attempt to rehabilitate from the shock of being born.Some people are too sensitive to withstand that.

Heather O'Neill

#36. When I thought about my old friends Linus Lucas and Theo, I realized they were not really criminals either. They were like me. We were just acting out the strangest, tragic little roles, pretending to be criminals in order to get by. We gave very convincing performances.

Heather O'Neill

#37. Perhaps the most dangerous people in the world are the ones who believe in right and wrong but what they ascribe to as "right" and "wrong" is completely insane. They are bad with the conviction that they are good. That idea is the impetus behind evil.

Heather O'Neill

#38. That was desire messing with physics: putting its finger on the record and then slowing it down, making sure you heard every word spoken, and memorized it.

Heather O'Neill

#39. The real first kiss is the one that tells you what it feels like to be an adult and doesn't let you be a child anymore. The first kiss is the one that you suffer the consequences of. It was as if I had been playing Russian roulette and finally got the cylinder with the bullet in it.

Heather O'Neill

#40. He always had to act in an obnoxiously idiosyncratic way.

Heather O'Neill

#41. I turned to the page on decorated buttons and tried to ponder their beauty instead of my own loneliness, trying to will myself into being a sociopath.

Heather O'Neill

#42. His adolescents are displaced aristocrats who have lost their kingdom and wealth, which was childhood. [On J.D. Salinger]

Heather O'Neill

#43. When she said sweet things in my ear, it would slide right down into my heart

Heather O'Neill

#44. My dad had told me that if you stayed out after nine and you were a girl it meant that you wanted to have sex with whoever was passing by. He told me that if I got raped after nine o'clock the courts would probably say I deserved it.

Heather O'Neill

#45. Boys are good at personas. There are a certain number that you can get at the drugstore, like costumes before Halloween. Being cool is pretending that you're not afraid of anything. But everybody is afraid. Everybody is afraid.

Heather O'Neill

#46. Many writers were picked on as children. Why? Because they were weird from the get-go. They were often to be found at the back of the class smelling erasers, or talking to caterpillars, or walking down the street with an encyclopedia balanced on their head.

Heather O'Neill

#47. I was always moved when mean people were suddenly nice to me. It was a weakness that would lead me into some bad relationships later in life.

Heather O'Neill

#48. We confused the indoors with intimacy and electric heating with connection. Every night seemed like the last night because we would all freeze to death shortly.

Heather O'Neill

#49. In Lullabies, I wanted to capture what I remembered of the drunken babbling of unfortunate twelve-year-olds: their illusions, their ludicrously bad choices, their lack of morality and utter disbelief in cause and effect

Heather O'Neill

#50. A lot of children grow up in poverty with flawed parents, but their inner world is still as inherently filled with wonder and innocence as children who are kept away from the city's underbelly.

Heather O'Neill

#51. You see only the beautiful things when you stand still. You only see things that you don't ordinarily notice. The birds are the prettiest things, I imagine.

Heather O'Neill

#52. She had fat arms, the type of arms that held sailors and soldiers and thieves. The kind of arms that held someone who was going away to jail for ten years. They were the arms of a woman who had eaten a hundred delicious cakes and pastries to get them this comfortable.

Heather O'Neill

#53. The cat looked at its paws and frantically back at its body, as if it had just been transformed into a cat and couldn't accept it.

Heather O'Neill

#54. When you're a kid, if you watch 'The Jeffersons' with your family at seven o'clock, it seems like a natural phenomenon, like the sun setting. The universe is a strange, strange place when all of a sudden you can't use your glass with the Bionic Woman on it any more.

Heather O'Neill

#55. He said that when you are in love with someone, you want to follow them to the bathroom. He said love just makes you pathetic.

Heather O'Neill

#56. I was trying my best to straighten out my life, but I always ended up in the middle of some festive waste of time.

Heather O'Neill

#57. I closed my eyes and the roof was gone. I could see the stars while the piano tinkled. I could see Jupiter and it was blue, and Neptune was silver like a tennis ball sprayed silver. I could reach out and touch it, like cold water.

Heather O'Neill

#58. Adolescents are still children in that they can't yet tell the difference between make believe and fiction.

Heather O'Neill

#59. But although she interacted with so many people during the day, no one could actually say that they were close to her. There is an aloofness to the permanently heartbroken, a secrecy. There was something impenetrable about her. There was a door that she had closed, which no one could get in.

Heather O'Neill

#60. A cat peeped in the window. It had one white paw. One night it had decided to dip it into the reflection of the moon in a fountain to see what would happen.

Heather O'Neill

#61. You came out of prison incredibly buff or with an addiction to paperback novels.

Heather O'Neill

#62. We had started thinking of ourselves not in terms of things that we had done, but in terms of what we were going to do.

Heather O'Neill

#63. Everything written by any woman was written by all women, because they all benefited from it. If one woman was a genius, it was proof that it was possible for the rest of them.

Heather O'Neill

#64. Adolescents are attracted to tragic heroes. That's why rock stars dress like homeless people. Adolescence is a fall. It's when every child becomes an orphan.

Heather O'Neill

#65. You become the closest approximation of yourself that can tolerate living there.

Heather O'Neill

#66. My breath in the cold air was bleach that accidentally spilled on a black t-shirt.

Heather O'Neill

#67. Ridiculous. You guys are going to have the most boring documentary on earth," I said and stormed inside.
"Could you walk in the building again, but slower and don't slam the door," Hugo called after me.

Heather O'Neill

#68. The piano was just now telling me how it feels so odd when it rains. The rain can cause you to suddently feel guilty for all the tiny crimes you have committed, like not telling your friend that you love her.

Heather O'Neill

#69. The stars are always up in the sky ... then when it is perfectly black, they feel less vulnerable and out they come.

Heather O'Neill

#70. From the way that people have always talked about your heart being broken, it sort of seemed to be a one-time thing. Mine seemed to break all the time.

Heather O'Neill

#71. Fireflies danced around her like embers after someone has thrown a log into the stove.

Heather O'Neill

#72. What kind of bird do you think these feathers come from?' she asked.
'I don't know. A swan?'
'You had better stop wearing those wings, then.
A swan might fall in love with you. And as you
probably know, swans mate for life.'
'You are a funny one, Rose.

Heather O'Neill

#73. We just thought of old age as some sort of clown routine.

Heather O'Neill

#74. I stuck a barette with a silver star into my black hair. If I was going to be popping my head in and out of bars like a wife who was looking for her husband who had just got paid and was squandering all the money, at least I was going to look unbelievably fantastic while I was doing it.

Heather O'Neill

#75. He was and probably still is, to this day, the worst-smelling person I have ever hugged. But it was wonderful. He just wrapped his arms all the way around me. He hugged me the way that parents hug: with them doing all the work.

Heather O'Neill

#76. The night was a typewriter key that got stuck and kept punching all the letters on top of the others until all that was left was a black blob. No word, no letter, no message in the night for me.

Heather O'Neill

#77. There was this professional hockey player that I liked. I imagined him watching at the parade and falling in love with me. It didn't occur to me that he probably wasn't interested in twelve-year-olds.

Heather O'Neill